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About this lesson

Learn to standardize the type of duration you add to tasks in days or weeks for ease of use. 

Lesson versions

Multiple versions of this lesson are available, choose the appropriate version for you:

2013, 2019/365.

Quick reference

Add Durations to Each Task

When you add durations to a project, you should standardize on the type of duration you enter. For example, do not create some tasks in days and other tasks in weeks. In most cases, using days is the best method. For example, if a task takes 2 weeks, then enter a duration of 10 days. The real reason for this is more for the sake of yourself and anyone else reading the project. Your eyes will read down a list of durations, and floating in the sea of days is a few tasks in weeks, which you might miss.

Further Discussion

You want to avoid using Microsoft Project to micro-manage your team. Unless you really have to, only create tasks that start at 5 days in duration. If they are shorter, you might be putting too much detail into your project. Of course, if there are very important tasks that take 1 or 2 days, you can add them, but try to keep that level of detail to a minimum.

By default, tasks have a question mark (?) next to them. This is a queue to you that you have not yet typed a duration into the task. You can type a question mark next to tasks if you want so you can remind yourself to go back and perform an estimate.

Steps

When adding durations, you can enter them in the following fashion:

  • If you type 5 and press enter, the default duration type of days will appear, so the task will show as 5 days.
  • If you type 5d and press enter, Microsoft Project will assume you want the task to appear in days and will show as 5 days.
  • If you type 5d?, the task will show as 5 days?, showing that the task still requires more estimating.
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  • 00:04 Right now we have a list of tasks in our project.
  • 00:06 As you can see, we haven't estimated the duration for these tasks yet, so
  • 00:11 that's the next thing that we're going to do.
  • 00:14 Now you might be wondering what this one day question mark is.
  • 00:19 Well, first of all, whenever you create a task,
  • 00:22 it's always set as one day in duration.
  • 00:24 The question mark means that it's estimated.
  • 00:29 If I double click on this task, and I can double click on the Duration field, or
  • 00:34 double click on the row, I'll just double click anywhere I want here on the task.
  • 00:38 You can see there's an Estimated checkbox on the General tab.
  • 00:43 And if I deselect, the question mark goes away.
  • 00:47 I'll Cancel this screen.
  • 00:50 Another way to remove the question mark is to just go ahead and
  • 00:54 type over it, so I'll just type 1 and press Enter.
  • 00:58 And what you can see now is that the question mark is gone.
  • 01:01 This question mark is designed to give you some indication as
  • 01:06 to what tasks have been estimated and which ones have not been estimated yet.
  • 01:12 There's another way to look at these estimated tasks,
  • 01:17 and that's if you go to the View tab.
  • 01:20 And then up on the View tab, you'll find a Filter area, and
  • 01:23 you can locate that in the Data section.
  • 01:26 You can see this little picture of a filter.
  • 01:28 If I click the pick list here,
  • 01:30 we have this Tasks with Estimated Durations option.
  • 01:35 And that will filter only the tasks on the screen that are tasks
  • 01:40 that have the question mark next to them.
  • 01:43 I'm going to turn this filter off, so
  • 01:45 I'll just go back up here to the Filter list and choose No Filter.
  • 01:50 This question mark doesn't really do anything else to your project,
  • 01:53 other than to let you know you probably want to do something with the task.
  • 01:57 Just as before, you'd typically sit down with your team and
  • 02:01 ask how long each one of these is going to take.
  • 02:04 Now, one of the things you probably want to avoid is asking people
  • 02:08 how many hours it's going to take, how many weeks it's going to take.
  • 02:12 Focus everyone on what is the duration,
  • 02:15 we can get down to the details of how many hours it will take afterwards.
  • 02:20 So it's a good idea to just sit down and talk about the durations.
  • 02:23 Now, when you enter a duration, and you start getting estimates,
  • 02:28 you just type the duration and press Enter.
  • 02:31 We have a setting of a default of days.
  • 02:34 If yours is not displaying that,
  • 02:38 just type the d next to it, so 20d, 10d.
  • 02:43 And what's happening now is as you're typing the letter d,
  • 02:47 it's changing it to days.
  • 02:49 Now you can list things as months, days, minutes, weeks.
  • 02:53 If I do this though, and put weeks in here, and most everything else is
  • 02:58 listed in days, it's going to be very hard to notice that this is a weeks.
  • 03:03 So it's a very good idea to just keep everything always the same, don't mix and
  • 03:08 match days, weeks, minutes, months, and just keep it as days.
  • 03:13 I'll go ahead and finish entering the rest of the durations for this project.
  • 03:23 Now as I get to the last task here, you'll notice that it says move in.
  • 03:27 Well, actually that is kind of the last thing that we do.
  • 03:31 And everything is set up in our house, so
  • 03:34 this might just be a milestone, so I'll go ahead and type 0.
  • 03:38 And watch what happens over here on the right hand side of the Gantt chart when I
  • 03:42 press Enter, it turns into a milestone.
  • 03:45 We'll create more milestones in our project later.
  • 03:48 Now I want to talk a little bit about these durations that we entered.
  • 03:52 As I mentioned before, we want to keep the durations in days.
  • 03:57 But we also want to try and keep these durations at a higher level,
  • 04:02 so not less than five days.
  • 04:05 It's not like it's a hard and
  • 04:06 fast rule that you shouldn't create durations less than five days.
  • 04:10 But it's a good idea to think in terms of five days and more as a task,
  • 04:14 rather than one day, two day, the certain times that they belong.
  • 04:19 You also do not want to put tasks in your project that have very long
  • 04:24 durations unless it makes sense, so for example this acquire land task.
  • 04:29 Well, while you're going through the process of working with the banks and
  • 04:34 acquiring that land, and getting whatever kind of city permits and what have
  • 04:39 you that you need just in order to do that, this might just take that long.
  • 04:44 There may not be many tasks in here, you're just waiting.
  • 04:46 And so that's okay, we can just go ahead and leave it as 30 days.
  • 04:51 But consider that sometimes when you have these long duration tasks,
  • 04:54 it's very hard to manage, because there might be more work that's going on that
  • 04:59 you should know about as a project manager.

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